1. A BI-MONTHLY NEWSLETTER February 2010
Save The Dates
Feb. 20th (Tea) and Feb. 27th (Coffee)
Tracy Stover
Coming as guest speaker to Women of Purpose Tea
Come meet this talented young lady at our Annual Women of Purpose Tea. A
graduate of University of Washington in Seattle, she achieved a masters degree in Art at
Oxford. Tracy has recently become the country director for Chad. She serves in a
community known as Goz Beida where World Concern is helping with refugees fleeing
the crisis in Darfur, Sudan and Eastern Chad. Tracy oversees opportunities for food and
jobs to this community of refugees.
Read what Tracy is up to in Chad
“My name is Mattra,” reads a letter from the African country of Chad. “I am 30
years old. I have two girls, one boy - and no home. Janjaweed militia men on horses killed
my mother and father, burned them in their own hut. I had to leave my village. Then my
husband went off with another woman. This war has cost me everything.”
Mattra is one of 60,000 refugees and displaced people living in camps near Goz Beida,
Chad, crowded into a space that usually houses about 5,000 people. Sudan borders Chad,
so many refugees have fled across the border, but the violence has spread, displacing
native Chadians as well.
World Concern has kept 30,000 of those people alive for more than two years with health
programs, food for the sick and elderly, and several agricultural programs.
When Mattra’s children were sick with scabies, World Concern taught her how better
hygiene would make them healthy. “So I used soap to wash my children,” her letter says.

2. “I washed all of our clothes and boiled our bedsheets. When I did that, the scabies began
to disappear!” She now teaches others about hygiene.
“We would love to be able to do the health program again,” said Chad Country
Director Tracy Stover. “They really had no idea why their children always had diarrhea.”
The program saves lives, since young children get dehydrated and die from diarrhea, but
there is no funding.
Mattra and 5,000 others are in the Cash For Work program, planting trees, digging
wells and water pans for rain collection, or placing rocks in lines to protect the hills from
erosion. They get an average of $32 per month, which allows them to buy basic
necessities. Counting their family members, the program is benefiting 30,000 people.
Female-headed households get priority. “There’s so many people who could work and are
willing to work, so we’re trying to target the vulnerable that are getting missed in other
ways,” Stover said.
The families already get rations from other aid groups, but those don’t include
meat, vegetables or sugar, and sometimes there are none for months. Stover said instead of
being handed standard rations, the women can buy what fits their families’ needs. “The
dignity of choice, I just think it’s a beautiful thing.”
World Concern has also trained people and given supplies for dry-season
agriculture, veterinary care, HIV/AIDS issues, operating mills to grind grain and running
small businesses. Stover said the people are excited to have skills and assets they can use
when they go home. “We really do in many ways offer hope,” she said.
(Small child at grinding mill)
World Concern is helping camp savings and loan groups with microcredit. In the
Rent To Own program, World Concern buys assets for people, who repay the organization
a few months later. This includes veterinary tools and medicines, donkey carts, sewing
machines and even a satellite dish for one man who wants to charge people for access to
TV.
However, more is needed. Chad is ranked by the United Nations as the fifth
poorest country in the world. Nearly 90 percent of the people are illiterate, and 40 percent
of the children up to six years have chronic malnutrition. The rebels are a constant threat,
except during the rainy season. Stover sees Chadians slowly returning to their homes, but

3. not Sudanese refugees.
“There’s just so much need,” she said. “You just feel like you’re doing so little
compared to what they need.”
She does see God at work as the refugees benefit by learning hygiene and new
skills, and more and more girls are going to school. Different tribes are working together
in World Concern programs and building relationships, which Stover calls “incredible.”
Programs employing women make the community realize women have value,
when traditionally they have been treated like property, Stover said. “They’re no longer
going to their husbands begging for money, so the men see it as a very positive thing
because their wives are no longer nagging them.”
Thanks to Laurel Eddy, who interviewed Tracy for this article.